Intimidating Databases and Code

I am liveblogging the keynote from the bloggers table at the PASS Summit again this year. Just keep scrolling.

Watching the introduction video as people trickle in. All the other bloggers are setting up. I get in early. I didn’t rearrange the seats this year. I see others doing it now.

8:11: Watching the videos of all the attendees registering and meeting people at the start of the event and last night’s welcome reception is awesome and fun.

8:21: The lights go down and the videos of what everyone is looking forward to at the Summit. In keeping with our location, right next to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, we’ve got a bit of a race theme going on. We’re seeing current PASS President, Bill Graziano having a dream about driving a car. He’s starting off with the list of PASS Board members, just so you know who it is that’s doing the most of the work for this fantastic volunteer run organization.

We’re also getting a listing of the 700K hours of training that have been put together by the PASS Organization.

8:30: We get to find out who the PASSion award winner is. Amy Lewis, who is absolutely an amazing person, is the winner this year. Ryan Adams, sitting right behind me blogging away, was an Honorable Mention Volunteer. Well done Ryan. They also ask you to nominate outstanding volunteers for the year too. Make sure you do. This really is a volunteer run organization, so you need to support the volunteers.

8:37: Quentin Clark takes the stage with a listing of companies that have adopted Azure technologies. If you read my blog, you know it’s one of my passions (although I’m still a query tuning freak). You need to get going with it.

Quentin is starting with the concept of “A story about transformation.” He’s showing how Brick and Mortar and Internet are helping each other, not hurting each other. Integration between the stores and the internet made things better. The comparison is of course aimed at telling the story between on-premises computing and cloud computing. It’s a compelling story. We’re seeing how they’re rolling out a series of software that is available now, or in the very near future, which is different than past key notes where we saw stuff that was coming out “next year” or “real soon.” That’s an awesome approach.

8:49: We’re seeing all kinds of new technology in 2014. They’re not fundamental changes causing a rewrite of technology. Instead they’re additional technologies, updateable column store index and in-memory tables and indexes for OLTP. It’s awesome. It makes it possible to do more, when you need to, rather than only after rewriting your entire app. I think the work they’re doing in Azure is making it possible for them to release more frequently to the on-premises versions without causing breaking changes. It’s a great way to get things done.

8:54: I love the demos when they are more realistic. We can see a 10% improvement on queries, just by using Memory Optimization. They’re also introducing the Native Compilation, which means a true compilation, turning a proc into code on the structure of the SQL Server instance, not simply a query plan stored and accessed in cache. That resulted in another 11X improvement in performance. The issues around this though is that most of this technology is very hardware intensive. You’ll have to have big boxes for this to really help you. So yes, we’re getting great new technology, but you’re only going to be able to really blow it out of the water with other great new technology.

The main points they want to tell us is that it’s built into SQL, which is 100% true. They also want us to know that there is no new hardware needed, which doesn’t make sense. You can’t put stuff in memory without using more memory. It has to impact existing hardware. However, I see the utility of it.

8:59: They’re expanding on the abilities for availability and recovery. Sorry people, but this means taking advantage of additional functionality in Windows Azure. But it works. I’ve seen it in action in production environments. You can set up AlwaysOn secondaries in Windows Azure. You can backup to Windows Azure. It’s not a requirement to migrate your systems out of your environment, but to use the Azure system as your backup and recovery mechanisms.

9:05: They new backup tools are great. From 2014 we get backups that are encrypted without requiring the database to be encrypted. That’s great. They’re also making it so that you get backups that you can automate based on data changes, not just a timing thing. That opens up whole new ways to protect your systems. I’m excited by this stuff. I’m also interested to see that they’re releasing a tool that will let you incorporate backups to the cloud from your 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 systems, not just 2012 and 2014. That’s great, but it hurts companies like Red Gate that have been offering this as a product to people for years. Ah well.

9:17: Microsoft continues to expand it’s Hadoop offerings supporting it through the desktop and through Azure in HDInsight. Most of this stuff is in preview, but they have people using it in their production environments, so it must be relatively solid. The point is being able to query everything. Not simply this type of query from structured data and this type from nonstructured.

9:28: Mostly talking about BI stuff. I’m glad we’re serving out the data in better and more interesting ways. I just can’t get too excited about it. In the mean time I’m actively configuring a CTP2 of SQL Server 2014 in an Azure VM while the event is going on. People are trying to download it instead of setting up a VM. They’re crazy.